Dear Charlotte:

You are very welcome, Charlotte!

“I need to work on mentally not being so upset by my parents for sure. It’s the main reason I started therapy”- I don’t remember discussing your parents outside the context of politics, if I remember correctly. If you’d like to elaborate on having been so upset by your parents, please do.

Regarding your follow up questions:

1) “how do I know something is intuition or my anxiety? For example, if I feel nervous, is it my intuition telling me something bad will happen?  Or is it my anxiety taking over?”

A definition of intuition from Cambridge English Dictionary: “an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts”-

– my answer to your question: anxiety is an ongoing state of fear brewing below the surface, sometimes leaking out to the surface slowly, at other times, erupting. For an anxious person, when something distressing happens, or a distressing thought occurs, what comes up immediately to the surface, is not an understanding of any kind, but fear. Fear comes up from below the surface first, before anything else. Whatever understanding or any other feeling that comes up following the fear, is heavily influenced by the fear that’s already there.

Therefore,  I say, better for an anxious person to abandon the concept of intuition altogether.

2) “how do I know therapy is working or if what my therapist’s advice is right for me?”- ask the therapist for her reasons behind the advice she gave you. When she told you that you better pack everything and move to Europe, you could ask her if she would like to move to Europe herself, and for what reasons/ motivations, then compare her reasons/ motivations to yours, and research the matter.

A quick example that comes to mind, if she told you that she wants to move to Europe because she doesn’t like American men and wants to meet a European man to marry, you can figure that her reason and motivation does not apply to you because you are already married.

“I still want to circle back with you in a few weeks regarding the 2nd child issue”- circle back with me anytime you want to, I will be glad to read and reply to you whenever you post.

anita